Boris Akunin: The Diamond Chariot

Standing beside the driver and gazing absentmindedly into the hot blaze of the firebox, Fandorin thought about the imminent encounter with the city of his youth and the event that had made this encounter possible.

It was an event that shook Moscow, in the literal sense as well as the figurative one. The governor-general of Moscow, Fandorin’s bitter enemy, had been blown to pieces by a Social Revolutionary bomb right in the middle of the Kremlin.

For all his dislike of the deceased, a man of little worth, who had caused only harm to the city, Erast Petrovich was shocked by what had happened.

Russia was seriously ill, running a high fever, shivering hot and cold by turns, with bloody sweat oozing from her pores, and it was not just a matter of the war with Japan. The war had merely brought to light what was already clear in any case to any thinking individual: the empire had become an anachronism, a dinosaur with a body that was huge and a head that was too small, a creature that had outlived its time on earth. Or rather, the actual dimensions of the head were huge, it was swollen up with a multitude of ministries and committees, but hidden at the centre of this head was a tiny little brain, uncomplicated by any convolutions. Any decision that was even slightly complex, any movement of the unwieldy carcass, was impossible without a decision of will by a single individual whose wisdom, unfortunately, fell far short of Solomon’s. But even if he had been an intellectual titan, how was it possible, in the age of electricity, radio and X-rays, to govern a country single-handed, during the breaks between lawn tennis and hunting?

So the poor Russian dinosaur was reeling, tripping over its own mighty feet, dragging its thousand-verst tail aimlessly across the earth. An agile predator of the new generation sprang at it repeatedly, tearing out lumps of flesh, and deep in the entrails of the behemoth, a deadly tumour was burgeoning. Fandorin did not know how to heal the ailing giant, but in any case bombs were not the answer – the jarring concussion would totally confuse the immense saurian’s tiny little brain, the gigantic body would start twitching convulsively in panic, and Russia would die.

As usual, it was the wisdom of the East that helped purge his gloomy and barren thoughts. The engineer fished out of his memory an aphorism that suited the case: ‘The superior man knows that the world is imperfect, but does not lose heart’.

The factor that had disrupted the harmony of Erast Petrovich’s soul should be arriving at the Nicholas station in Moscow any minute now.

He could only hope that Lieutenant Colonel Danilov would not blunder …

Danilov did not blunder. He met his visitor from St Petersburg in person, right beside the reserve line at which the ‘compound’ arrived. The lieutenant colonel’s round face was glowing with excitement. As soon as they had shaken hands he started his report.

He didn’t have a single good agent – they had all been lured into the Okhrana’s Flying Squad, where the pay and the gratuities were better, and there was more freedom. And therefore, knowing that the engineer would not have alarmed him over something trivial, Danilov had decided to reprise the good old days, taken his deputy, Staff Captain Lisitsky, a very capable officer, to help him and followed the mark himself.

Now the engineer understood the reason for bold Nikolai Vasilievich’s agitation. The lieutenant colonel had had enough of sitting in his office, he was weary of having no real work to do, that was why he had gone dashing off so eagerly to play cops and robbers. ‘I’ll have to tell them to transfer him to work in the field,’ Fandorin noted to himself as he listened to the adventurous tale of how Danilov and his deputy had dressed up as petty merchants and how deftly they had arranged the surveillance in two cabs.

‘In Petrovsko-Razumovskoe?’ he asked in surprise. ‘In that d-dump?’

‘Ah, Erast Petrovich, it’s easy to see you haven’t been around for quite a while. Petrovsko-Razumovskoe’s a fashionable dacha district now. For instance, the dacha to which we trailed the dark-haired man is rented by a certain Alfred Radzikovski for a thousand roubles a month.’

‘A thousand?’ Fandorin echoed in astonishment. ‘What kind of Fontainebleau is that?’

‘A Fontainebleau is exactly what it is. A huge great garden with its own stables, even a garage. I left the staff captain to continue the surveillance, he has two corporals with him, in civvies, naturally. Reliable men but, of course, not professional sleuths.’

‘Let’s go,’ the engineer said briskly.

Lisitsky – a handsome fellow with a rakishly curled moustache – proved to be a very capable fellow. He hadn’t wasted his time sitting in the bushes, he had found out a great deal.

‘They live on a grand scale,’ he reported, occasionally slipping into a Polish accent. ‘Electricity, telephone, even their own telegraph apparatus. A bathroom with a shower! Two carriages with thoroughbred trotters! An automobile in the garage! A gym with exercise bicycles! Servants in lace pinafores! Parrots this size in the winter garden!’

‘How do you know about the parrots?’ Fandorin asked incredulously.

‘Why, I was there,’ Staff Captain Lisitsky replied with a cunning air. ‘I tried to get a job as a gardener. They didn’t take me – said they already had one. But they let me take a peep into the conservatory – one of them is a great lover of plants.’

‘One?’ the engineer asked quickly. ‘How many are there?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s a fair-sized group. I heard about half a dozen voices. And, by the way, between themselves they talk Polish.’

‘But what about?’ the lieutenant colonel exclaimed. ‘You know the language!’

The young officer shrugged.

‘They didn’t say anything significant with me there. They praised the dark-haired bloke for something, called him a “real daredevil”. By the way, his name’s Yuzek.’

‘They’re Polish nationalists from the Socialist Party, I’m sure of it!’ Danilov exclaimed. ‘I read about them in a secret circular. They’ve got mixed up with the Japanese, who promised to make independence for Poland a condition if they win. Their leader went to Tokyo recently. What’s his name again …’

‘Pilsudski,’ said Erast Petrovich, examining the dacha through a pair of binoculars.

‘That’s it, Pilsudski. He must have got money in Japan, and instructions.’

‘It l-looks like it …’

Something was stirring at the dacha. A blond man standing by the window in a collarless shirt with wide braces shouted something into a telephone. A door slammed loudly once, twice. Horses started neighing.

‘It looks like they’re getting ready for something,’ Lisitsky whispered in the engineer’s ear. ‘They started moving about half an hour ago now.’

‘The Japs’ spies don’t seem any too bothered about us,’ the lieutenant colonel boomed in his other ear. ‘Of course, our counter-espionage is pretty lousy, right enough, but this is just plain cheeky: setting themselves up in comfort like this, five minutes away from the Nicholas railway station. Wouldn’t I just love to nab the little darlings right now. A pity it’s out of our jurisdiction. The Okhrana boys and the provincial gendarmes will eat us alive. If they were on the railway right of way, now that would be a different matter.’

‘I tell you what we can do,’ Lisitsky suggested. ‘We’ll call our platoon and put the dacha under siege, but we won’t take it, we’ll inform the police. Then they won’t make any fuss about it.’

Fandorin didn’t join in the discussion – he was turning his head this way and that, trying to spot something. He fixed his gaze on a freshly trimmed wooden pole sticking up out of the ground beside the road.